Typically, central meat forming manufacturing locations employ high volume, high speed automated molding machines to form different shapes and sizes of meat patties, including hamburger, steak, fish, poultry and pork patties. The manufacturers distribute the patties to restaurants, grocery stores and other retail outlets. In the high volume machines, a supply hopper feeds raw meat into a food pump that pumps the meat, under pressure, into a mold cavity of a mold plate. The mold cavity is typically one or more holes extending completely through the plate. The mold plate is moved cyclically from a fill or form patty position to a discharge or stamp patty position and back to the fill position, etc.
One complete fill position to discharge position to fill position cycle is commonly referred to as a stroke. Manufacturers typically run the molding machines at sixty to ninety strokes per minute. This means that the machine stamps out one or more patties sixty to ninety times a minute. To increase production, the manufacturer can run the machine at a higher speed. To save wear and tear on the machine, however, the manufacturer desires to run the machine at a lower speed. Increasing or decreasing the stroke rate therefore creates a tradeoff of benefits.
Another solution for increasing production is to increase the number of patties that the machine stamps out upon each stroke. Increasing the number of patties per stroke requires more cavities in the mold plate. Since many or most meat patty forming operations employ forming machines having a single row of cavities, existing forming machines are modified to have or new machines are obtained having multiple rows of cavities in the mold plate.
Operating a multiple row forming machine presents new challenges to manufacturers accustomed to the single row machines. One difficulty that the multiple row machines present involves the fill portion of the cycle described above. With single row machines, each patty forming cavity passing across a fill slot receives the same amount of fill time. With multiple row machines, achieving equal filling time is more difficult, and may not be possible in a retrofitted machine. Since forming machines are expensive, however, it is desirable to modify existing equipment, if possible, to achieve multiple row forming. Accordingly, a need exists for an apparatus and method to efficiently operate and evenly fill the cavities of a retrofitted or new multiple row meat patty forming machine.